Contempt - Alberto Moravia [100]
“What was it made you see that?”
“I don’t quite know...lots of things...chiefly, perhaps, the tone of your voice, yesterday evening.”
“And are you really convinced now that I’ve never done all those dreadful things you accused me of?”
“Yes, I am convinced.”
There still, however, remained one thing that I had to know, perhaps the most important of all. “But you,” I said, “you don’t think I’m a despicable person do you?...even though I haven’t done those things...despicable because made of despicable stuff...Tell me, you don’t believe that, Emilia?”
“I’ve never believed it...I thought you’d behaved in a certain way, and that’s why you lost my esteem...But now I know that it’s all been a misunderstanding...Let’s not talk about it any more, if you don’t mind.”
This time I said nothing, and she was silent too, and I started rowing with greater energy, with an energy that was now redoubled, it seemed to me, by a feeling of joy which gradually, like a rising sun, grew and mounted within me, warming my spirit which till then had been aching and numb. Meanwhile we had reached a point opposite the Green Grotto, and I steered the boat towards the cave, already visible, and appearing to hang, dark and crooked, above an expanse of cold green water. “And you do love me?” I went on.
She hesitated and then answered: “I’ve always loved you... I always shall love you”; but she said it with a kind of sadness that surprised me. “Why,” I insisted in alarm, “why do you say that in such a sad way?”
“I don’t know...perhaps because it would have been better if no misunderstanding had ever come between us and we had always loved one another as we did in the past.”
“Yes,” I said, “but all that’s over now...We mustn’t think about it any more...Now we’re going to love each other forever.” She appeared to nod her head, but without raising her eyes, and still rather sadly. I stopped rowing for a moment, and, leaning forward, added “We’ll go to the Red Grotto now... It’s a smaller cave and very deep, beyond the Green Grotto... There’s a little beach at the end of it, in the dark...We’ll make love there, shall we, Emilia?”
I saw her lift her head and nod her assent, in silence, gazing fixedly at me, with a look of discreet, and even rather bashful, complicity. I started rowing again energetically. We entered the grotto, beneath the great vault of rugged rock upon whose surface water and sunlight threw gay reflections, casting upon it a close net of quivering emerald. Farther on, at the place where the sea penetrated only at intervals, making the vault resound with hollow reverberations, the water was dark, with a few smooth, black rocks emerging from it like the backs of amphibious beasts. Here was the tortuous opening, a narrow passage between two rocks, that led through to the Red Grotto. Emilia was sitting quite still now, looking at me and following each one of my movements with her eyes, in an attitude of sensual but patient docility, like a woman who is ready to give herself and is only awaiting the signal. By thrusting, first with one oar then with other, against the walls of the channel, beneath the stalactite-hung vault, I brought the boat through into the open and then steered it towards the dark mouth of the Red Grotto. “Look out for your head,” I said to Emilia; and then, with one stroke of the oars, I propelled the boat over the smooth water into the cave.
The Red Grotto is divided into two parts. The first, like an entrance hall, is separated from the second by a lowering of the vault overhead; beyond this point the cave bends sharply and runs a considerable distance back to the beach at its farthest end. This second part is plunged in almost complete darkness, and one’s eyes have to become accustomed to the gloom before one can discern the little subterranean beach, which is strangely colored by the reddish light that gives its name to the grotto. “It’s very dark inside the cave,” I went on to say, “but we’ll be able to see as soon as our eyes get used to it.” In the meantime, carried along by the force of my